Strengthening the Role of Public Health in Environmental Policy

Over the past 25 years there has been a steady decline in the role of public health agencies in environmental protection. This paper examines the major factors that have contributed to that decline, including the impact of federal environmental laws, the disparity in funding between regulatory and public health activities in environmental protection, and the emergence of risk assessment as a basis for environmental decisions. The methods of risk assessment and traditional public health approaches are contrasted, and the advantages of the involvement of public health agencies are discussed. Recommendations are presented for strengthening the role of public health in environmental decisionmaking to address more effectively public concerns about environmental risks.     

‘Annamese Coolies’ at Australian Ports: Charting Colonial Geographies of Emotion,and Settler Memory,from French Vietnam to New Caledonia via Interwar Australia

In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Australia on its way to New Caledonia. The movement of the Ville d’Amiens steamer through Australian waters sparked protests against alleged ‘French slavery’ and, eventually, moved politicians to recall the ‘injustice’ of the ‘pre-White Australia’ era. This article uses the Ville d’Amiens episode as a portal through which to explore the nexus between geographies of colonialism and of emotion. It argues that colonial and national power operated in pervasively ‘triangular’ ways, via the interplay of an affective triangle – of guilt, shame and pride – and a geo-political triangle – of French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Further, the article calls for greater exploration of the historical, geo-spatial contingencies of memory, motion and emotion.     

Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the dialogue with the PCI

In this article I study the theoretical impact of Cold War ideology on Italian democracy through the dialogue between Norberto Bobbio and the leaders of the Italian Communist Party in the mid-1950s, in particular the philosopher Galvano della Volpe and the General Secretary Palmiro Togliatti. I claim that Bobbio's choice of dialogue with the 'enemies' of the western model of democracy was in itself a criticism of the Cold War logic and its Manichean theology of good and evil. What I call Bobbio's politics of dialogue has been roundly criticized in Italy, particularly since 1989, when revisionist scholars accused the non-Communist intellectuals of previous generations of not understanding Communist totalitarianism. I take the revisionists' challenges as my point of departure for an analysis of Bobbio's politics of dialogue and its underlying theoretical implications. Bobbio challenged the Communists on three related topics: the theory of the state, the philosophical character of Marxism, and the theory of liberty. Keeping the door open to illiberals did not imply relativism or passive acceptance of any opinion: failure to understand this basic fact led late revisionists to misinterpret Bobbio's dialogue with the PCI as a sign of weakness rather than strength. The dialogue strengthened Bobbio's conviction that it was crucial to link the defense of individual liberty to the defense of democracy, and thus avoid the dualism between negative and positive liberty, liberalism and democracy, a trait peculiar to Cold War liberalism as well as its leftist antagonists.